Brave new world

The text is remarkably clean. One genuine issue in the final section: "both ostensibly warning the same warning" is an awkward verbal loop. Everything else — spelling (US throughout, with "gramme" correct in direct quotes from Huxley's text), register, structure, clichés — passes.

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The World That Loves Its Chains

Picture a regime so total it doesn't bother with prisons. It hands out free drugs instead. It abolishes mothers, manufactures babies in batches of ninety-six identical siblings, and whispers slogans into your ears while you sleep until you can't tell your own thoughts from the State's. No soldiers patrol the streets. There's no need. Everyone is too happy to rebel, and the few who aren't get sent to remote islands where they can be miserable in peace.

This is the future Aldous Huxley imagined in 1932, set six hundred years from his present, in the year of stability A.F. 632 — after Ford, the new messiah, whose Model T launched the assembly line and, by extension, the assembly-line human. Huxley wrote it as satire and as warning, and almost a century later the warning has aged in a way that should make us uncomfortable. Orwell's nightmare was a boot stamping on a human face forever. Huxley's was subtler and meaner: a face smiling because it had been taught from before birth that being stamped on felt good.

The book has no real protagonist for the first third. It opens, instead, with a tour of the factory where people are made. That choice tells you what the novel is about. Before any character can act, you have to see the conditions under which acting is no longer possible — the way pleasure, predestined and metered out, has eaten everything that used to make a person a person. What follows is the story of three misfits who notice the cage, and one outsider who breaks himself trying to live without it.